Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Cabell examined the picture, looked shiftily at Cash, then smiled apology and relief. Not till now that he saw how far his suspicions were out did he realize how afraid he had been. Doug Peppiott and Cash—they were two very different propositions. He had come prepared to blast Cash to hell, but not sure by any means that he could do it. Ungrateful dog that he was to think of such things—and of a man he owed so much! A splendid fellow. A splendid, honest fellow. “I don't know what to say,” he began. “I'd never be so big I could do without you—the only fellow I've met in fifty years who hasn't tried to do me down. Lucky Jack Cash, eh? It's helped me, your luck.”

  “Lucky in some things,” Cash said, as if it was an affliction. “Lucky with money.”

  “Oh, aye.”

  In a burst of comradely affection Cabell put an arm around Cash's shoulder. “No, I can't let you go. There are big things in the wind. I can smell them. This new loan's going to fail in London. There'll be a hell of a crash, and this time we'll be on top of the storm. We'll be millionaires five times over. The Dennises are in the soup already and so is Flanagan. See, read that.” He opened a copy of the morning paper and pointed to a paragraph.

  Cash took it and read:

  IMPORTANT ENGAGEMENT

  OLD FAMILIES UNITED

  The engagement is announced of Miss Jennis Bowen, well-known daughter of Mrs Bowen and granddaughter of Sir Michael Flanagan, to Mr Douglas Peppiott, son of Mr and Mrs Albert Peppiott, of Moray Street, New Farm. The wedding, which is expected to take place shortly, will unite two of our oldest families. The marriage gains added interest from the fact that Mr Peppiott and Sir Michael, who have sat on opposite sides of the House for some time, recently joined the new Coalition Ministry. . .

  “It'll unite Flanagan's bankruptcy to Peppiott's fortune,” Cabell chuckled. “That's my guess. He's as cunning as a garbage-rat, Flanagan. They reckon it was him who got Peppiott into the Cabinet.”

  Cash was silent, pondering over the paragraph.

  It flashed into Cabell's mind that he was thinking of Harriet and Doug Peppiott. He took his arm from Cash's shoulder.

  Cash put the paper down. “It's no good,” he said gloomily. “I've made up my mind. I'm going.”

  “How soon?” Cabell said.

  “Early after Easter.”

  “Ah,” Cabell said. “Time's short with you then.” His suspicions were alive again. (“He's wondering what effect this will have on Harriett,” he decided. “He wants to change his mind.”) “You won't even have time for a trip to the Reach.”

  “That's the point,” Cash said, rousing himself once more. “I want to ask you a favour and make you an offer. I've got eighty thousand quids' worth of assets—fifty thousand in Waterfalls and odds and ends. It's not much beside your hoard, but it needs watching and I'm sick of the game. So I want to put by enough to see me through the rest of my days—in some steady way that doesn't keep you on the hop.”

  “Consols?”

  “Something like that. But first of all I want to make Miss Harriet a present—a wedding-present if you like. So I've turned over half the Waterfalls in her name.” He took a paper from his pocket. “Give her this from me. It's the lawyer's claptrap. I'm sorry I haven't the time to give it to her myself.”

  “But she'll never need. . .”

  “Yes, I know it's only a fleabite beside what you'll leave her, but just in case—I mean, why the hell shouldn't I?”

  “It's devilish handsome of you,” Cabell said uncertainly, wondering what was behind such generosity, what it would do to Harriet. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Too bad you cannot come to the Reach and let her thank you herself.”

  “Impossible,” Cash said quickly. “But I'll drop her a note before I leave. A hobo's blessing, eh? Ha-ha. Hmn.”

  “Hmn.”

  They were both silent and shifty for a while, then Cash said briskly, “Well that's half the Waterfalls. You can have an option on the rest. And now for the favour. My assets'll need careful selling. How about doing it for me? You'll have a finger in the pie and my lawyer will give you a hand. Otherwise I'll have to put my trip off a couple of years.”

  “Not at all. Not at all.” Cabell leant eagerly across the table. “You do me an injustice to doubt it. . .”

  So it was arranged. Cabell was to buy the Waterfalls for twenty-five thousand pounds and purchase consols with the money—at his convenience. The rest of Cash's property, shares, a couple of mortgages, and some land, he was to realize on as the chance turned up. Cash signed the papers making Cabell and his lawyers joint trustees and left for Sydney to oversee the fitting out of his ship.

  A splendid fellow! If Harriet had any nonsense in her head she'd soon get over it now.

  Chapter Four: Change of Heart

  Harriet had already made strenuous efforts to get over it. Fifty times a day she told herself that she did not, could not love Cash, and once a day, as she was falling off to sleep, she admitted that she did.

  Harriet, as her father noticed, had changed again, not back to the old Harriet with the cold, clear, confident, untouched eyes of a spoilt child who thought that worlds could be remade by her whim, but into a woman more strikingly like Emma than ever, the dangerous, sly, stubborn Emma he remembered. She looked at him tearfully no longer, neither did she fly into peevish tempers when he argued with her. She listened. She let him put his arm around her. But whether she heard or felt there was nothing on her face like a sallow wax mask to show.

  “You're not human. If somebody cut you, you wouldn't bleed.”

  It was as though all that flux of passionate feeling had turned to lava, stiffening her.

  The change dated from the moment when Cash startled her with the news that he was going away and she realized what an emptiness of days lay ahead. Maybe for ever, he said. She was barely conscious of the cold reply she made. She was thinking that there would be nobody left whom she could trust as she trusted him, and as she thought of that feeling he gave her of absolute safety behind his rocklike body, his serene, tolerant mastery of a difficult life, a hideous idea presented itself—that she loved Cash, that she had started to love him the first day he came to the Reach ten years ago, when he used to call at the house in Brisbane and she put on her new dresses to show him, and that jealousy of Queenie had cut the flow of her love and turned it towards Doug Peppiott. Hideous! Oh, yes, it would be hideous if it were true because what would become of her when he was gone? It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “You can't go. You can't let Father send me to England to marry a man I won't ever be able to love.”

  She searched his eyes for some sign that he would understand, but Cash's eyes gave no signs. The hard core of the iris returned only the image of her own face.

  She turned her head away quickly and bit her tongue. Thank heavens, she hadn't let it commit her. Clearly he didn't care a button.

  “You like adventures, don't you?”

  “As long as I can scare young ladies with them after.”

  Young ladies. Not her, not any particular young lady. Just one of a kind. That's all she was to him—a young Lady Tomnoddy. And it was true, too! He'd seen through her and he despised her as suddenly she despised herself for wanting to be the wife of a man he could talk about so witheringly.

  She glued her eyes on her sewing and he began to whistle softly to himself.

  “See, he's happy now because he's going away. Oh, I wish I was in his place and he was in mine. I'd break my arms to stay.”

  Now when she sat by his bed she spoke hardly a word. She had plenty to say and she counted the days that remained as though there would be no more for her after, but she waited for him to speak first. Every time he opened his mouth her heart stopped beating. Why? she asked herself angrily. Wasn't it plain as daylight that he would never say THAT? And yet—the way he had talked to her at the ball: hadn't he seemed to mean something quite different from what he was saying. What had he said? She could not remember, except that he had tried t
o stop her from going to Doug Peppiott and had confessed, hadn't he, that he wasn't really so concerned for her father. Could he have been jealous? No, that was absurd. He would not merely have talked to her—not he. He'd have dealt with Peppiott as, she admitted now, she would have liked to deal with Queenie the day she saw them in the gardens. Perhaps it was only for her father's sake he spoke, and because he liked her and was sorry for a silly girl. And yet—the way he had talked last week about her going to England: did THAT mean something? No, it only meant that he thought Tomnoddies were fools and so was she.

  Still hoping but pretending that she did not, that the new, burning pain of love was a fancy, telling herself that she only wanted to marry an English gentleman and have the Peppiotts and the Bowens crawling at her feet, pumping up a feeling of indignation at the idea that he, such a common man, should dare to talk about Lord Tomnoddies, she counted the last few days, the last few hours and the last few minutes as they stood on the veranda in the early morning and he offered her his hand. “Good-bye, Miss Harriet. I've got some deep scars to remember you by.”

  She wanted to throw her arms around him and say, “Take me with you. I'm not spoilt. I'm not silly. I'm not a lady any more if that's why you can't love me. I'm lower than Queenie. I've got my mother's blood in me, and I'm glad.”

  She hung on to his fingers when he tried to release her hand. “Oh, Mr Cash. . .” But she could get no farther.

  “Shake a leg,” Cabell said testily. “You can't keep the coach waiting.”

  Then he was gone, and the house was deadly, dully silent again. The air in it suffocated her. She went for long rides alone. “I was a coward,” she told herself. “I should have confessed. What if I did make a fool of myself? It might have been worth while.”

  The valley turned brown in the summer sun with great patches of bare red earth in the dry grass. The inhumanness and poverty of it soothed her after the orgy of misery and her father's too opulent dreams. In the aromatic, silent scrub she felt that she was being washed clean of these overheated emotions. Now she hammered her way back through the wreckage of her integrity and tried to recover some of that brave self-assurance she had felt, and which she believed Cash had seen and admired, the day she made him understand that she was a little girl no longer. Of course she did not recover it. It had broken itself against the unsympathetic backs, the derisive smiles, the shocked grimaces of the Nice People. She must build herself a new pride, stronger than the old one because now she knew the power of the Nice People and the shame of her own momentary capitulation to them. That new pride was already born. It was born the moment she heard Cash talk of Lord Tomnoddies.

  The word had sardonic overtones for an Australian ear. It was a caricature of all pretence, incapacity, unmasculinity—what Harriet had felt when comparing James and her father, Todhunter and old Purvis. Now she realized with shame that the ideal husband she had dreamt of these last few months was a mingling of all the most pretentious, incapable, unmanly qualities of her brother and old Purvis's grandson, and her pride, born as a revulsion from her own pretences, weakness, and corrupted feminine integrity which had seen their imago in James and Todhunter, sent her to seek her imago in Cash, the diametrical opposite of all Nice People and all phantoms. As she had tried to make herself worthy of the Nice People by reflecting that the Lords of Felsie were her cousins, she now tried to make herself worthy of Cash by telling herself that she was Emma Surface's daughter, closer to Cash than to the Lords of Felsie, heir to her mother's quiet, passionate strength which Cash admired. She saw, too, in her father, the old landtaker qualities she was happy to think were bred in her bone, not qualities brought from Owerbury, but those forged in his long struggle with the land. Thus, paradoxically, she felt more affection and respect for him as she turned away from him again and perceived, at the same time, the pathos of his divided spirit, damned to lie with ghostly loves and fight for certain failure, which had nearly been the tragedy of her own. In this new change of heart, this requickening of desire for life and love which had seemed to be dead, she understood, what she had guessed before, that the niceness of the Nice People, the flight from crudities, was a corroding lie against their most precious selves, most precious because most passionately living and, anyway, inescapable except by suicide. That suicide she had nearly committed, that corroding lie she had let into her own heart, and asking herself what would have become of her if Cash had not turned up, she was horrified by the answer that in the fullness of time she would have grown into an old maid like Miss Montaulk. But what now? What better fate was in store for her? She lay on the dry, red earth and wept. “Oh, come back, come back and take me away!”

  When she rode into the homestead yard Cabell was waiting on the veranda for her—always waiting and prying. Half a dozen times a day as she sat in her room she heard the door open softly and knew that he had crept down the passage to see what she was doing. If she was five minutes late for a meal he was running about the house shouting for her, and every time they met he tormented her with questions, “Where had she been?” “Who did she see?” “What was she thinking of?” “Was she tired?” “Was she happy?” “Did she want anything?”—indefatigably solicitous and distrustful. She knew it was none of these questions he wanted answered—that the real question in his eye was about Cash. “Do you love Cash?” “Are you hatching some plot?” “Do you want to kill me with another treacherous blow?” That was what he was asking.

  At every meal he ranted. Cash was a vagabond—a blackguard—an upstart—a vulgarian—a swine he'd picked out of the gutter—had nearly been hanged—kept low women. . .

  She listened without hearing, impenetrable.

  He rapped the table. “You're not eating again. Why? Tell me that. Skylarking all over the place one day and looking like a wet hen the next—what's the reason for it? Am I a bad father? Do I deny you anything? Haven't I spent twenty-two years planning and grafting for you? And now you sulk. What for, eh? That's what I'd like to know.”

  The next instant he was leaning across the table to pat her hand, murmuring, “Don't be angry with me, darling. I'm an old fool. Only I can't stand seeing you. . . Eat now—just this piece—just to please me. . .”

  She took her hands away and rose from the table.

  “You refuse to please ME, eh?” he shouted after her, “but you're quick off the mark when it comes to pleasing other men, making clandestine appointments or sitting on the side of their beds.”

  She closed the door and he put his head in his hands and groaned.

  The year passed. Cabell was away a good deal of the time, at the mine and in Brisbane, and Harriet had some peace, except for the incessant spying of Miss Montaulk, who kept a minute account of her activities and apparent state of mind.

  At the New Year Harriet took stock of the situation and made some resolutions. She kept telling herself that Cash was gone for ever, but she tried not to believe it. Well, she must believe it and, what was more, she must get over it. She would grow old in the valley, old and ugly—very well, she must resign herself to that, too. No more love and no more thinking about love. She must imagine that she had a little stone in her breast instead of a heart. She MUST. Ah, it was hard. Her heart would beat and send hot blood into her veins, but if she tried, if she told herself every day, “I do not love him,” she would conquer it at last.

  She found little jobs round the house helping Miss Montaulk, she set to work learning the difficult Beethoven Sonatas she had never been able to play, and whenever the thought of Cash broke through she worked harder and played harder till she was ready to drop. “I don't love him,” “I don't love him,” she repeated mechanically to the rhythm of her music and her needle. She had settled that in her mind, but she could not settle it in her young fractious body. She did not despair: she believed in the firmness of her mind and the dulling, deadening touch of the long years to come.

  Cabell returned from Brisbane in an almost hilarious mood. He brought a load of presents, more usel
ess jewellery for Harriett, a dress for Miss Montaulk, a pair of silver spurs for Sambo, even a shawl for Emma. As he was unpacking Miss Montaulk came to his room with her report. He drove her away. “Stow your gossip, woman. You must make the girl feel like a criminal, always snooping on her!”

  At lunch he chattered and chuckled about the doings in Brisbane—the plight of Flanagan and the Dennises, the imminence of great disaster for every one else and splendour for himself. He did not notice, or refused to notice, that she hardly touched her food. Eagerly she waited for some mention of Cash. Surely he hadn't left yet, without a word! But Cabell's good humour was a bad sign. The questioning look had left his eye.

  She listened to his rigmarole about the stock market, the loan market, the real estate market, her teeth buried in her under lip to stop her from crying out, “But tell me about Cash. Is he well? Is he in danger like Flanagan? Does he look happy?” But when the table was cleared and Cabell said, smiling, “Now I've got some real news—about Cash,” she wanted to run away and stop up her ears. She didn't think she could hear that Cash was gone, gone for ever, without bursting into tears.

  “A splendid fellow,” Cabell said. “One of the best. I did him wrong talking as I did. That's how it always is—a man never realizes who his best friend is till he's gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone from our ken. Always was a rolling stone, you know. Now he's off again. He's got hold of a schooner and sailed for God knows where.” “Oh! He's sailed?”

  “Yes,” Cabell lied. “He's sailed.” He watched her through the smoke of his cigar, but saw nothing on her petrified face, though to her it seemed to twitch and burn with tell-tale signs. “That's his way, you know. Here to-day—gone tomorrow. Not the kind of man you can count on. A wife in every port and a couple on board as well. Ha-ha! But a generous fellow, mind you. Devilish generous. He left you a little present.”